A Vision of Fire (7 page)

CHAPTER 10

Montevideo, Uruguay

H
eading from Port Stanley toward its first refueling stop in Montevideo, Uruguay, the Learjet Bombardier cut gracefully through the dawn sky like a white arrow.

Mikel Jasso—born in Pamplona, educated at Harvard, elite member of the Group—was the aircraft's sole passenger. He had begun the two-thousand-mile journey alone with his thoughts, his camera case, and a celebratory glass of Royal Salute scotch—a tradition after every successful mission. The Group routinely monitored that large southern swath of the hemisphere, and in ten years Mikel had successfully retrieved all eight of the relics they had instructed him to acquire. The relics came from museums, scientific research ships, military vessels, and tourists. This time the quest had begun four days earlier, when they intercepted a cell phone message from a Dr. Story to a colleague
at Oxford. Jasso had been dispatched to the Falklands immediately by private jet. He had booked a room at the Malvina House Hotel, waited for the
Captain Fallow
to arrive, talked to the crew, studied plans the Group had obtained from contacts at the admiralty, and made his move the next night.

As heists go, this one had been relatively effortless. Jasso knew that daytime on the vessel was used for repairs and provisioning, after which most of the crew went ashore. The watch at night was lax: no one, neither thief nor stowaway, had reason to board a geological survey ship that was about to head back into the cold, unwelcoming Southern Atlantic.

There had been no problem finding Dr. Story's cabin. Jasso had taken care to stay on the port side, where there was no moonlight and the shadows were long and deep. If he had been caught, that too would have been easily taken care of. Jasso was publicly, aggressively opposed to drilling in these waters in general and on the Patagonian Shelf in particular. It was a useful cover story for a man who spent so much time on Group business in that region, from the Humboldt Plain in South America to the Agulhas Plateau in Africa. If he had been detained by seamen or law enforcement, he would have claimed that Falkland Advanced Petroleum was not only harming the environment, they were recklessly destroying submerged historical treasures. The company would have wanted nothing more than to be rid of him. At worst, he would have had to turn over the relic. It would have ended up in a local museum from which, one day, it would disappear.

But he had not been caught. The artifact was his.

As soon as the jet was airborne, Jasso set his tablet on the table beside his scotch and established a Skype connection to New York. In less than fifteen seconds the thin face of Chairwoman Flora Davies filled the screen. Her eyes were alert, expectant. She smiled when she saw Jasso's grin.

“You did it.”

He raised the glass to himself.

“Show me,” she said. “Please.”

Jasso hefted the camera case to his lap and opened it. He removed a pair of rubber gloves, slipped them on, and withdrew the swaddled artifact. He placed the face of it in front of the red eye of the camera. Though it was probably just the glow of the computer screen, the object seemed luminescent.

“It's a symbol,” she said.

“It appears so,” Jasso agreed. “Something I've never seen.”

“Nor I. It's beautiful,” the woman remarked, leaning forward. “Turn it around.”

Carefully rotating the object, he showed her the reverse side. Seeing the markings facing him, in the dark, they really did have an inner radiance of their own.

“The finger of God,” he said.

“What?” she asked.

“Jehovah on Sinai, writing the tablets,” he said. “I was just thinking—­the markings are still visible even away from the light.”

“That's the metal content reflecting ambient light, I would suppose.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But I'll bet this is what the tablets of law may have looked like to Moses after they were cut from the rock.”

She smiled. “A theological side, Mr. Jasso? You?”

“I'd describe it as more poetic,” he said.

“Either applies,” she said.

Jasso did not disagree. He was not a religious man. He believed in the aspirational power of human beings, not in the interference of gods and demigods. Still, the impact of religion and mythology on what every civilization dreamed of and strived for could not be ignored.

“Excellent job,” she said, sitting back. “Thank you.”

“An honor, as always,” Jasso said.

He closed the tablet and nestled into the seat. His eyes yearned
for sleep but he wanted to savor the moment a little longer. The artifact's presence weighed heavily in his left hand. It was probably just his imagination, but it seemed to have the faintest vibration, like a tuning fork. He switched on the overhead light and brought it closer to his face.

“What kind of metal are you, I wonder.”

If it was of meteoric origin, it would be iron, but it seemed lighter than that. Silver? Aluminum? Magnesium? It had the look of those metals, but in a form unlike any he'd ever seen.

As he stared at it, the artifact had an almost mesmeric quality. It was something like watching a gyroscope: you couldn't
see
it moving, but you felt somehow that it was.

Or else it's the scotch
, he thought, snapping the spell.

Quickly wrapping the object, he put it back in the case and pulled off the gloves. Shutting his eyes and drifting swiftly into sleep, he dreamed of high ocean waves rushing over him in forceful, endless succession. He saw lights through the breakers: orange and flickering specks that formed strange, unfathomable shapes. But they were lost in the waves before he could make them out and they were different each time they appeared. Were they taunting him? So visible yet so remote . . .

He woke with a jolt as the aircraft jerked violently.

“Seat belts!” the pilot announced over the intercom.

Half-asleep, Jasso fumbled for the strap as the sole attendant weaved her way over.

Just as she reached him the plane tilted and she was swept backward against one of the seats on the other side of the aisle. Jasso reached to help her but was restrained by his own belt and grabbed the sliding camera case instead. The attendant slid into the seat and fastened her belt.

Hugging the case to his chest, he was again aware of the low buzzing he had felt when holding the artifact. He looked out the window and noticed that the aircraft was flying very low, just about
five hundred feet from the ground. It was dawn and the flaming sunrise obscured his vision, yet what he saw was unmistakable. Well over a dozen albatrosses were flying dead-on toward the underside of the jet, their eight-foot wingspans batting hard as they struggled to achieve the jet's height. He had never known the birds to seek this height or speed and was about to remark on the abnormality to the flight attendant when the birds began to drop, either exhausted or asphyxiated.

And then the world itself suddenly vanished.

The interior of the jet, the sky, and the low clouds seemed to depart, and in their place an explosive flash of red blinded him. His nostrils were filled with a smell like burning plastic, or was it sulfur? And his breath felt thick, tasted noxious on his tongue. His mind turned like a spinning top, his body seemed to liquefy, and his eardrums rumbled. The last rational thought he had was that one of the birds had been caught in the engine and they were plunging to earth. But there were no whining turbines, no rush of air, no impact—

“
No!
” he screamed in his mind.

“Mr. Jasso!”

The flight attendant's voice was at the far end of a tunnel.

“Mr. Jasso!” she repeated.

His shoulders were being shaken and his head bobbed in circles as he fought through the sensory chaos. Like poured molasses the plane began to come back into focus just as it thumped to a hard landing on the tarmac. He was aware of the rear-mounted jets roaring to help brake the aircraft, felt himself being pressed against the seat, saw the calm white of the cabin spread out in front of him . . .

The flight attendant was hastily undoing her belt.

“Wait, who had my shoulders?”

“Are you all right, Mr. Jasso?”

“What? Yes, yes. I'm fine,” he said.

But he wasn't. He felt nauseous, panicked. The vinyl of the
camera case felt hot, no doubt from how tightly he had been clutching it.

“I'll get you some water,” the woman said.

“No, I'm all right. Weren't you affected?” he said, starting to get paranoid.

“By what?” she asked. “The turbulence?”

“I don't know,” he said. “You didn't hear anything? See anything? Birds?”

“At this altitude?”

“That's what I thought,” he said, more to himself.

“No,” she said as the jet slowed and steadied. “I wasn't looking outside. Perhaps a cloud formation, a trick of the sunlight?”

“Maybe.”

“Mr. Jasso, you look pale. Would you like to have a doctor meet us at the terminal?”

“No, I'll be fine,” he said. “It was just . . . overwork, I guess. It will pass.”

She accepted his explanation with reluctance and went to the cockpit. The engines had slowed to a dull hum. Jasso thought he heard the woman ask about damage. The pilot said he was going out to check the aircraft when they refueled but didn't think he was going to find anything. The engines and flaps seemed fine.

Jasso drained what was left in his glass and sat very still as the jet taxied toward the refueling area. It seemed impossible, but . . .

But the birds . . .
they weren't an illusion. They seemed to be throwing themselves at the jet.

Was there something in the artifact that had . . . something in the stone, the metal? Perhaps it had interacted with particles in the air, with the electronics of the jet.

He looked at the case, which sat blank and unrevealing on the table. It was somehow menacing in its faceless simplicity. With sudden urgency he reached for the flap and threw it back, taking out the cloth-bound artifact.

The only thing trembling was his hand. The stone was very still. It was also cool. Whatever had begun in Port Stanley was apparently over.

Replacing the relic in the case and closing it, he gestured for a second glass of scotch and stared at the sleek new terminal in the distance. It looked like a flying saucer, a low, inverted white bowl gleaming red in the new day.

CHAPTER 11

T
he morning broke slowly across Caitlin's consciousness: a bright thread of illumination along the horizon, then flashes of yellow-orange light on the crests of waves, and finally the dawn itself. She had dreamed, she knew that, but remembered her dreams vaguely. Dark skies, gray water. And red. Somewhere there was red.

She swung herself out of bed and padded in to wake Jacob, who was instantly revved, talking nonstop about his zoo essay. He was still bubbling as she dropped him off at a birthday party. Caitlin asked a favor from one of the attending parents to shuttle Jacob to a second party later that day—the usual Saturday birthday deluge—then let herself into her office to catch up on work. She left a message for the Pawars to call her and let her know how Maanik was doing. By noon she still hadn't received a return call and she was beginning to worry. She considered calling Dr. Deshpande to see if he'd heard anything but she didn't want to push his boundaries on confidentiality. She called Ben instead. She'd sent him some stills from Maanik's video after she'd noticed the arm movements the night before, but his only reply was to ask her to meet him on his lunch break from the peace negotiations, which were continuing over the weekend. Ben specified
that she should meet him at the UN and not at the Pawars' apartment building.

Did the Pawars not want to communicate with her? Now she was really worrying.

She was given a day pass to Ben's office, a glorified closet-space on the fifth floor. He barely resembled himself. His face was dark and he kept rubbing the bone beneath his left ear, an old stress tell from their undergrad days. He said hi to her and that was all as he scooped up his tablet and hurried her out of his office, down a couple floors, and into a slightly larger workspace with a desk and a couple of chairs.

Shutting the door, he said, “This is one of the rooms they keep electronically secure. I was lucky to get it.”

“What's going on, Ben?” She was starting to feel uneasy.

“Nothing about Maanik. Well, not exactly.”

“You've lost me.”

“At nine fifteen this morning the ambassador suddenly announced a thirty-minute break and disappeared into his office alone. He was visibly distracted, uneasy, very off.”

“Had he received a call from home?”

Ben shook his head. “Honestly, I think everything just piled up on him at that instant. Maanik, post-traumatic stress from nearly having been killed, and ratcheted-up expectations from both sides. Full ­disclosure—he's had anxiety attacks in private now and then. It's a freakin' pressure cooker in there. And it got worse when he left. The Pakistani delegation basically lost it, started trumpeting that this was a ‘diplomatic illness' for nefarious purposes.”

“Maybe that was just posturing,” she offered, attempting to calm Ben from his own anxiety.

He shook his head. “One radical openly theorized that the ambassador was buying time for India to move its civilians out of major metropolitan areas in preparation for a strike. Meanwhile, most of the Indian delegation also flipped out. They think the ambassador's toying with them in some way, and they weren't really sure he was on their side to begin with.”

“Which he isn't. He's on a third side.”

“Huh?”

“He's on the side of compromise,” Caitlin said.

“Oh, right. Anyway, he was calmer after his break. I know he prays at times of stress, and maybe that's what he needed. But when the talks started again it was like we'd been set back three days' worth of negotiating.” Ben shook his head and drummed his fingers nervously on the table. “Caitlin, I'm afraid they might really do it this time. I think their atomic trigger fingers are finally overwhelming the instinct for self-preservation.”

Caitlin put a hand on his shoulder and breathed deeply. For a moment they sat in silence. Then Ben gathered himself and flipped open his tablet.

“So, I'm thinking we need some good news about Maanik for the ambassador just as fast as we can find some.”

“Okay . . . ,” Caitlin said, trying to catch up with his still-manic thought process, “you have something in mind?”

Ben opened the screenshots Caitlin had sent him. “I think you're right about the arm movements. If this is a coherent language, they're part of it. They may serve the same function as the diacritical marks in written Hebrew. Some of those marks change the letters, words; some serve as punctuation; some represent abstract concepts like numbers.”

“Wait, are you saying what I think you're saying?”

“Yep.”

“When did you study the video?” she asked.

“Let's just say it wouldn't let me sleep.”

“No wonder you look like crap.”

“You look good too.”

They smiled at each other.

“Okay, I'm with you,” she said. “But Hebrew diacritical marks are simple. Lines, really.”

“Right. I'm not sure what purpose these gestures serve, yet. They might be emphasis but I kind of doubt it; they're elaborate.”

“Could they be parts of words, like prefixes and suffixes?”

“Maybe, maybe, but look here.” Ben jumped to a screen grab Caitlin hadn't made. He had caught a moment when Maanik was lying on the floor, her mouth open to speak, her hands resting calmly beside her. “This was when she first dropped those unfamiliar sounds into English. Her arms were still. The gestures only started as she sped up.” He switched to one of Caitlin's screen grabs, where Maanik was still lying on the floor but her hands were in the air. Her left hand was angled away from her body; her right arm was starting to arc diagonally across her torso. “See? They could signify something we would ordinarily express through the subtleties of body language.”

“We?” Caitlin said. “That would suggest there's a ‘them' in this equation.”

“I know, that's crazy.” He rubbed below his ear. “But these expressions of hers have patterns and they're not like any I've ever seen. Maanik's not just riffing, Cai. What's more, it's going to be tough even separating discrete words from her stream of speech, since she barely stopped to take breaths. It's like when we hear a foreign language that seems to be a wild, racing babble to us but not to the speakers.”

“And you just suggested that those speakers are . . . what?”

“Cai, I really have no clue. Not from what little I've seen and heard here. Maybe it's some kind of schizophasia or glossolalia—”

“But people with schizophasia tend to use recognizable words, and Mrs. Pawar would have picked up on any kind of religious chant.”

“I'm not saying it has to be those, exactly, but something like them. I just don't know. This could be terra incognita. I've got a program that should help with transcription. I'll get to it tonight, let you know what I find out.”

He shut his tablet, stood, and before she could say anything, he leaned in and hugged her, briefly but close. She had wondered why he had brought her over here when he could have said everything on a phone call from this same secure room. This was why. The hug. She tried to imagine going home to an empty apartment every day after
hours of frustrating peace talks. The sudden sense of loneliness overwhelmed her.

“You know, they're lucky to have you,” she said. “You may think being a translator makes you invisible, but you're fighting to stay cool and grounded and I know everyone in the room is benefiting from that, whether they're conscious of it or not. You're doing a great job.”

He let go before either of them felt awkward and guided her from the room without further conversation.

Before leaving, Caitlin detoured across the newly renovated lobby to an exhibit:
Photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 1945–1946
. They were, in the oldest sense of the word, god-awful. She felt tears rise, looking at the dead or screaming people, the swaths of burn blisters, whole torsos stripped of skin, ears burned away, blinded eyes. And then there were the famous photos of human shadows on walls, caught in the atomic flash.

How, how, how
, Caitlin wondered,
how can anyone see these and want to repeat history?
These images weren't just about nuclear bombs. They were about the unthinkable, lingering pain and horror caused by every war in every era. In them was an implicit warning that the next big conflagration would be exponentially worse.
Yet here we are, rocketing toward it.

Her blurred vision was caught by one particular image, a young girl curled over her dead baby brother. Caitlin was surprised by how much the girl looked like Maanik. Caitlin wiped her eyes. A sign warned that this was a place for solemn meditation, nothing else. She checked that the security guard was facing away, then snapped a picture of the photograph with her phone.

As she left the lobby, more than anything in the world she wanted to put her arms around her son. But he was at the second birthday party and when she sent him a text—
I love you, kiddo
—there was no reply. Caitlin forced herself to return to her office and attack her backlog of paperwork instead of joining him at the party.

Four hours later, there he was, on a massive sugar high, bright-eyed and huggable.

Caitlin took him to a Ping-Pong club as a special treat for no particular reason—but after only half an hour, she received a phone call from the Pawars. They were in her neighborhood and were hoping to visit her, would that be all right?

Even as she was assenting, Jacob's hands were already rising to his hips in defiance. No doubt he recognized her apologetic shoulders and the sidelong glance that always signaled a change in plans.

“One more game,” he signed when she ended the call.

She shook her head and smiled. “So you'll play as slowly as you can?”

He couldn't help snickering; she'd read him right.

“Fifteen minutes,” she said. “And I'm sorry. I wouldn't cut us off if I didn't think it was important.”

He just shrugged and served an extremely fast ball, which she missed.

“I don't want to go,” he signed. “You have to sweeten the pot.”

She chuckled. “Where on earth did you pick up that phrase?” she signed.

“I read it. Don't change the subject.”

“All right, what are you thinking?”

“Extra hour of TV.”

“No way.”

“Okay, we order dinner.”

His reply was so fast she laughed. Her kid was learning to set her up.

“Okay,” she signed, feigning resignation, “but you pick the restaurant.”

“No, I pick the restaurant!” Then he giggled as he saw how she'd gotten him.

On their way home, they turned the corner onto their block and walked into the light of the setting sun. Suddenly Caitlin felt a strange
pressure against her chest again, a profound sense of being watched, and that whatever was watching her was smarter and faster and fiercer. She grabbed Jacob's hand, walked briskly, looking around for someone, something.

It's just me
,
she told herself unconvincingly.
It's just the exhibit and Maanik.

She was suddenly distracted by the sight of a black sedan parked outside her brownstone apartment building. A tall, blond man with an earpiece and an arm cast nodded when he saw her, though she didn't know him. He opened one of the back doors and Ambassador Pawar stepped out, followed by Mrs. Pawar. They stood together, composed and elegant, icons of stability despite everything they were going through.

“Hello,” Caitlin said, offering her hand to the ambassador and his wife in turn. She introduced Jacob, who signed his welcome. The Pawars caught on and dipped their heads toward him, smiling.

“Thank you for seeing us,” the ambassador said pleasantly.

“Is everything all right?” Caitlin asked, not willing to wait until they got upstairs.

He responded with a half smile. “There is a saying, ‘
Durlabham hi sadaa sukham
.' It means that one cannot have happiness alone.”

Caitlin smiled back.

Upstairs, with Jacob ensconced in his room poring over menus, Caitlin seated the Pawars in the living room. She offered them tea, which they declined, stating that they only intended to stay a few minutes.

“How was your day?” she asked generally, but meant the ambassador.

“Taxing,” he replied.

Caitlin turned to Mrs. Pawar. “Maanik?”

“There have been no further incidents,” the woman said. “I've instructed Kamala in what to do. She will call if there is a recurrence.”

“I see,” Caitlin said.

“The blackberries,” the ambassador said. “It is somewhat disturbing that one can have that much power over a child. Over any human being, though I confess I could benefit from a cue like that in my professional life.”

Caitlin smiled.

“Maanik did agree to the cue,” Mrs. Pawar reminded him.

“Yes, I would not have done it without her consent,” Caitlin said, trying to reassure them. “And believe me, if she ever feels an urgency to communicate that is more important than calming down, she can and will ignore the cue.”

The Pawars seemed surprised by that.

“So she is not helpless,” the ambassador said.

“Not in that sense, no.”

“Then our real daughter is merely locked away somewhere?” he asked.

“In a manner of speaking, that's the case with many of the kids I see. But we frankly don't know yet what Maanik is experiencing.”

Mrs. Pawar pressed her palms together and the ambassador suddenly seemed to be searching for words—or courage, she couldn't be sure which.

“Dr. O'Hara,” he said slowly, “I know that our daughter needs help—help we must continue to provide as quietly as possible. This is not an easy thing for a father to do, to weigh his responsibilities against the well-being of his daughter. Yet it must be done.”